COMMENT: GM backs its bottom line Support for U-M case has dubious
basis: Profitability COMMENT: GM backs its bottom line Support for U-M case has dubious
basis: Profitability
March 19, 2003
BY BRIAN T. FITZPATRICK
One in a series of commentaries on the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, which will be argued April 1 before the U.S. Supreme Court. Racial discrimination is good for the "bottom line." So suggests General Motors in an amicus brief it recently filed in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the University of Michigan's admissions policy. Its sentiments were echoed in a separate brief filed on behalf of dozens of other Fortune 500 companies.
These briefs prove one thing more than any other: The American business community is not very innovative when it comes to its justifications for racial discrimination. The University of Michigan's admissions policy ranks undergraduate applicants on a 150-point scale. The policy awards 20 points to minority applicants -- blacks, hispanics and American Indians -- by mere virtue of their race.
By contrast, applicants can receive no more than 12 points for top SAT scores and a mere 3 points for writing an outstanding essay. General Motors, et al., have argued to the Supreme Court that without U-M's policy, the number of minorities graduating from the university will decline. This would, General Motors says, "reduce racial and ethnic diversity in the pool of employment candidates from which the nation's businesses can draw their future leaders, impeding businesses' own efforts to obtain the manifold benefits of diversity."
What are the "manifold benefits" of increasing the percentage of some minorities in the workplace -- and thereby reducing the percentage of whites and Asians? According to these briefs, the principal benefit appears to be a more robust bottom line: Businesses with racially diverse employees can more effectively sell goods to an increasingly racially diverse customer base. General Motors notes that "racial minorities in the United States presently wield an impressive $600 billion in annual purchasing power -- a number that is increasing exponentially with expanding minority populations."
It also suggests that businesses whose employees are able to identify and cater to these market preferences will prosper; businesses whose employees cannot will fail. The other Fortune 500 companies agree: A greater percentage of minority employees translates into businesses "better able to develop products and services that appeal to a variety of consumers and to market offerings in ways that appeal to those consumers."
In short, as General Motors asserts, U-M's admissions policy makes it "more profitable." Profitability, however, has never been a valid defense to intentional racial discrimination -- despite the fact that businesses have been advancing for several decades this argument that racial discrimination should be permitted whenever it allows businesses to more effectively sell goods to certain groups of customers. Indeed, this was one of the principal arguments that advocates for the business community in the South employed in their attempt to defeat the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The argument met with no success then, and it will meet with no success now. Several congressmen opposed the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that employers who believed that white employees could sell products more effectively to white customers (and black employees more effectively to black customers) should be allowed to take that fact into account when making hiring decisions. This was not "bigotry," they contended, but simply an effort to boost the bottom line. They argued that racial discrimination should be excused whenever race is a "bona fide occupational qualification."
That argument was defeated, and soundly so. Supporters of the Civil Rights Act rightly argued that any such defense would be the exception that swallowed the rule. There is little doubt today that the nation is better off for rejecting the profitability defense to the Civil Rights Act.
There is equally little doubt that the Supreme Court will find the profitability of General Motors and other Fortune 500 companies a rather unpersuasive reason to excuse racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Some things are more important than money. The Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" is one of them. BRIAN T. FITZPATRICK, a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, is an attorney in Washington, D.C.
His views do not represent his law firm's.
Write to him in care of the Free Press Editorial Page, 600 W. Fort St., Detroit, MI 48226.
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